Advanced Featured Post Widget

The Plugin

With the Advanced Featured Post Widget you can put a certain post into focus, by displaying it in one of your widget areas. You can decide, whether or not to display the post thumbnail and whether the post titel is on top or under that thumbnail. Style your widget in a different way to give it even more exposure. ‚Advanced‘ means in this case, that even if your theme doesn’t allow you to hide sidebars, you can specify in the widget on what type of page it is visible.

Select the post to be displayed simply by choosing it from a drop down menu, to have a backup post (to be shown, when the main post from the widget appears on a single post page) just give a second post in another drop down.

History

We needed something to feature certain posts in the widget area of the theme, we are using. But not every theme seems to let you hide the sidebar(s) on certain pages. That’s why we made, next to the basic version of the Featured Post Widget, this a bit more extended version of it. You can specify, where the widget is shown and if wanting to, you can style the links seperately in the settings section.

Current Version

The current version is 3.4.2 and has a Dutch, German, Slovak and Ukrainian translation. Furthermore, you can define a ‚read more‘ link for the featured posts, if needing one. It’s more foolproof now, since if you forget to choose a post, there is a random post shown instead.

Change Log

3.4.2 WP 4.3 ready
3.4.1 bug on update fixed
3.4 small bugfix; more options for virtual styles
3.3.5 Ukrainian translation added thanks to Michael Yunat (http://getvoip.com)
3.3.4 Mistake in image class fixed
3.3.3 Interference with WordPress Page Widgets eliminated
3.3.2 Bug with fetching the image fixed
3.3.1 DSS now compressible
3.3 Code correction
3.2 All ‚Divided by Zero‘ errors should be eliminated
3.1 More foolproof
3.0 Ability to display images better
2.9.3 Instead of styling each individual widget, you can style now the whole class
2.9.2 Giving the ID of a post includes custom post types as well, you can display the entire post instead of an excerpt.
2.9.1 Post Category can be shown now
2.9 You can give the post ID’s now if not wanting to use the dropdown menus
2.8.6 Inner beauty was added (code streamlined etc.)
2.8.5 Slovak translation added thanks to Branco Radenovich
2.8.4 No multiple posts when wanting a random post
2.8.3 Bugfix with headline and css
2.8.2 Bugfix in framework
2.8.1 Bugfix with missing class
2.8 Adjustable size of the post headline
2.7 Also the wp thumbnail is adjustable in size now
2.6 Bugfix, the plugin doesn’t crash the widget area anymore
2.5 Bugfix and translations changed
2.4 Some classes added to framework
2.3 Small bugfix in autoexcerpt
2.2 Complete overhaul of the code. The plugin hooks now into the Ads Easy Plugin, to set Google AdSense Tags, if wanting to (this became deprecated).
2.1 More accurate excerpt function, images have better ‚title‘ tags, get’s also an image if working with galleries and uses dss instead of writing a css file all the time
2.0 Bug fixes and streamlining done; choosing posts is easier now and if you don’t choose a post, a random post will be taken
1.5 The textareas are now resizable and the input fields got smaller
1.1 Bug with empty style sheet on possible update fixed; settings accessible from plugin page now
1.0 Initial release with German and Dutch language pack

Installation

To install the Advanced Featured Post Widget Plugin simply download it here, unzip the file and upload the folder named „advanced-featured-post-widget“ into the /wp-content/plugins folder of your blog.

Once you have done that, simply activate „Advanced Featured Post Widget“ in your plugin panel and customize the instances of your widgets, when you place them into your sidebars.

Screenshots

This is the plugin working with WP 3.1 and the 2010 theme.Styling of the linksWidget Settings

Donation

If you use the plugin and like it, we appreciate a donation. If you find the plugin useful and like it very much, we appreciate your feedback even more.

19 thoughts on “Advanced Featured Post Widget”

This plugin has been great up until recent WP updates and now it is not rendering updates to the main post within the widget. If however we change the selection within „Choose here the backup post. It will appear, when a single post page shows the featured article“ and press the Save button it will update the footer widget!? This is not a fix, it just forces the updates and is too long-winded to do every time.

I don’t know who Zoltan is, but regarding the Featured Post Plugin and the Advanced Featured Post Plugin, they are two similar yet completely different plugins. So, the ability to align the image is not missing. It just was never there.

Hungarian translation would be always appreciated, of course. But for your problem I have to tell you that I couldn’t figure out yet, what might be the problem.

And this is a featured post widget, not a recent post widget. That’s why it can’t just feature the latest post. I have once written a recent post widget for some customer and could put that into the repository as well by now.

Hi, I try to use your nice plugin, but it disappears nearly all the time I refresh the page. I have to set the widget with all datas again. I use it with Mantel theme and Siteorigin’s Page Builder.
What can be the problem?

And a question: Is it possible that the widget will show only the latest post? The newest post should be featured. That would be a nice option.

This plugin has the potential to be a killer one!
If you need Hungarian translation, feel free to ask me!
Cheers
Zoltan

Hi, This is a nice plugin. I need to display a single post in a sidebar. Your plugin has many nice features including breaking sentences. However I also need to display the entire post rather than an excerpt, or at least control the size of the excerpt. is this possible ? I think if I could specify the excerpt size this would work

Hi, this is an incredible plugin. Thank you so much for the hard work on this! Is there any way you might offer a plugin with all the same features for „Random“ posts too? I would like to run them both since the customization features in this one are so useful! Thanks!

I don’t have a real idea of what is going on there, sorry. I updated the plugin but something must have gone wrong with the repository. Some people seem to have that freezing problem. I don’t have it with any of my testing environments. I just released a new version of the plugin to force updates again to hopefully bring an end to the freezing.